A Different Way to Look at Your (and Your Customer’s) Success
At Uni Pro Painting, we understand the importance of setting clear, actionable goals for our business. We do it every year, and this year is no exception. But we don’t stop there. When it comes to commercial painting projects, it’s important to set goals for client success too.
What we mean by that is simple, but often overlooked. You see, our customer’s success is our number one goal. So setting goals for our own business would be short-sighted if we didn’t properly focus first on our customers. It’s not easy, but it’s important. Here’s how we do it, and how you might be able to do the same in your business.
Clarity and Focus: The Blueprint for Success
Sure, we set a path for our business. We know how many new projects we need to secure. We know what cost projections we need to hit, and where our expenses should fall. We have a plan for how many employees we should have to reach our growth goals.
But we also look at our project blueprints and processes. Where can we improve our results when it comes to understanding a customer’s needs and definitions for success? Which projects seem to go better, and where can we improve our services? How can we make things more understandable for our clients to help us all get on the same page from the very beginning?
Setting a goal to improve the planning process for a commercial painting project is a specific objective that will help us to hit our company goals, because it makes our customers happier at the beginning, along the way, and in the end.
What processes can you improve upon in your business to make things better for your customers? Let that be a goal in your new year planning!
Motivation and Momentum: Building Progress One Stroke at a Time
We set goals so that we’ll have something to target together. Something to push toward. Something to help us define success. For instance, we set yearly goals and schedule timely reviews to make sure we’re on pace and on track.
We also set goals to help our customers maintain momentum. We are thinking along the lines of improving communication with our customers before and during projects. We have specific goals for increased client engagement where needed, or for efficiencies on the job. The best way to do this is to audit some of our past projects. Where were the road bumps? What could we have done differently?
What experiences from last year can you draw upon today to make the new year that much smoother for your clients? Make those improvements specific goals to hit.
Measurable Results: Seeing the Impact
Goals are often focused on the end result. While it’s important to name the result you want, it’s a mistake to let that define your goal. Because if you wait for the end to see how you did, it may be too late. At Uni Pro Painting, we focus on the things we can now that will affect the end result. How many sales calls do we need to make? What commercial painting project timeline should we be striving for? When we make our goals actionable today, then tomorrow tends to take care of itself.
For our clients, it’s the end results that matter. But we focus on goals that make sure we’re doing things right in the first place, things they might not even be aware of. What is our effectiveness in ordering products to reduce project timespan? What can we do to ensure the right employees are on the right projects to keep a project moving?
For your business, when you set “interior” goals that affect the client’s satisfaction with the “exterior” results, you’re focusing on the things you can control.
Adaptability: Adjusting Course When Necessary
The best thing about goal setting is that it provides clarity today, especially when we realize that there is nothing clear about tomorrow. We know what we want the future to look like, and we set goals based on our understanding of what it will take to get there. But things change, and we need to be able to change too.
One goal we have is to troubleshoot in advance of a client’s project. We budget properly, allowing for margins and error, and market flexibility. By knowing what it will take to make a client happy now, we can anticipate if something has changed along the way. Then we can have those client conversations sooner before we all lose our way.
Perhaps there is a goal you can set that will help you to increase your flexibility within, to help increase your client’s satisfaction no matter what happens along the way. It makes sense to anticipate change, because “change” may just be the only thing we can ever be purely confident will happen.
Of course, we have our goals at Uni Pro Painting. Any good business does. Setting goals is essential for driving success, we all know that. But we like to go the extra step to set goals that ensure we treat every project as a partnership, helping our clients achieve their vision with careful planning, precision, and professionalism.
Whether you’re looking to refresh an interior office space, transform a showroom, or revitalize the exterior of your commercial building, we’re here to help you every step of the way—with goals for your satisfaction both with your project and with us.